by Robert Scott
Yet, as in the Elaine McCollum case and possible Rodriguez/McDonnell case, leads began to dry up about the Carol Leighton murder. One by one the detectives at GHSO started working on other cases. No one had bragged about killing Carol, just as no one had bragged about killing Elaine. Detective Matt Organ was promoted to chief criminal deputy and relinquished his role as primary detective. Sergeant Dave Pimentel was assigned to take charge of the Investigation Division.
About all of these changes, Lane said, “Life went on. I had by now inherited two murder cases that I believed were committed by the same person. Now I just had to prove it. The cases stayed with me, always hovering in the back of my mind. I began seeing the face of Carol Leighton in my bathroom mirror every morning as I shaved. Her face was covered with blood, her eyes partially open, staring at me as I spread shaving lather on my face. The sight would be there only for a few minutes and would be gone by the time I brushed my teeth. But it was there every morning, making sure that I didn’t forget her. I don’t know why I saw her face and not Elaine McCollum’s. It was just Carol, lying on that muddy gravel road as I first saw her. I didn’t tell anyone about her daily visits, and I never forgot.”
The image of Carol Leighton did not leave Lane’s thoughts, and in late 1996, he contacted the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Virginia. He wanted them to take a look at the Elaine McCollum murder and Carol Leighton murder, and see what characteristics they had in common, and perhaps provide a profile of the suspect or suspects. Lane had seen this done many times on television shows about the BSU, and he’d also read articles and books about that unit. Eventually Lane spoke with Special Agent Mark Safarik and asked him what they needed.
Agent Safarik told Lane that the FBI profilers needed complete copies of both cases, as well as 8×10 photos of the crime scenes and autopsy reports. Lane asked Jennifer Cowardin, a support specialist with GHSO, to provide this material for him. In time Lane had close to a hundred 8×10 copies made of relevant photos, and he produced a videotape of the two crime scenes and downtown Aberdeen area showing Mac’s and the spot where the Smoke Shop had been. Lane narrated the tape, pointing out key locations, and where various evidence items had been found on the Weyco Haul Road. When he gathered all the material together, it filled a large archive box.
Lane took the archive box to the FBI field office in Seattle and turned it over to Special Agent Rick Mathers. Mathers then shipped the box to BSU in Quantico, Virginia, and then Lane waited.
In May 1997, he finally received a report from Special Agent Safarik. The report was disappointing, to say the least. In the opinion of the analysts, there was no connection between Elaine McCollum’s murder and Carol Leighton’s murder. They felt that in spite of the fact that the two women were murdered on the same isolated road in Grays Harbor County, the manners of death were too different, and too much time had elapsed between one murder and the other. And the “killer signature”—the thing a single killer did in common—was not evident in both cases. Worse than that, the BSU stated that since both victims had led fairly high-risk lifestyles, frequenting bars at night, and participated in prostitution in Carol’s case, the BSU could not provide a profile of who the perpetrator might be, because there were just too many variables.
Lane recalled, “To say I was disappointed is an understatement. At the very bottom of the report was a ‘just in case’ line, stating that it was possible the killer of both women was the same man, but the BSU didn’t think so. I at least expected them to point out some obscure detail that would show that the murders were committed by the same suspect. In a county of over nineteen hundred square miles, two women were murdered on the same logging road a mile apart, [it] was just too hard to believe that they were mere coincidence. Sure, they were killed by different means. Sure, they were killed five years apart. I didn’t care what the experts said, I knew they were wrong!
“In the years I had been investigating murders in a county with a population of only sixty-six thousand, I had witnessed many ways people treat their fellow man. I’ve seen people who have been shot, stabbed, beaten to death, pushed off a cliff, drowned, burned, run over—you name it. In all of the murders I’ve investigated, there were only two that stuck out for their level of violence. They were the murders of those women on the Weyco Haul Road. The image of the two women stayed with me, lying on the gravel road, faces covered with their own blood. Faces distorted, with a look of panic in their eyes as they fought for their lives. Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton had their problems, but they were people who laughed and cried, loved and hated, had their hopes and dreams. All of that ended on a gravel road late at night.”
The FBI profile was a major setback for Lane’s theory about Elaine and Carol, being killed by the same suspect. The GHSO sheriff and undersheriff both held great stock in what the BSU had to say. But Lane Youmans was adamant in sticking to his guns about his own theory. He later said, “The profilers didn’t stand over those bodies. Theirs was the opinion of people who lived three thousand miles away.”
Lane put the murders of Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton way on the back burner, but he did not forget them. Almost every morning there was the brief image of Carol’s face in his bathroom mirror, as if pleading with him to find her killer. One year turned into the next, with no real progress on the cases, and then out of the blue, on March 17, 1999, David Gerard struck Frankie Cochran in the head several times with a hammer and stabbed her in the neck as well. He was sure she would die, but Gerard did not count on Frankie’s incredible will to live. And he especially did not count on her fingering him as her attacker, and setting off an epiphany in Lane Youman’s mind that the attacker of Frankie Cochran and the killer of Elaine McCollum and Carol Leighton, and possibly Patty Rodriguez, Patricia McDonnell, Matthew Rodriguez and Joshua Rodriguez, were all the same person: David Allen Gerard.
10
PARALLEL LIVES
There is one inescapable fact about Aberdeen, Washington, and that is that the ghost of its most famous former resident, Kurt Cobain, lingers and permeates the place. Not unlike Elvis Presley and Tupelo, Mississippi, you cannot walk down a street or turn a corner without reminders that “Kurt was here.” In Undersheriff Rick Scott’s office, there is even a wry reminder of that fact with a picture of Kurt on the wall stating those very words: Kurt was here!
Kurt Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, at Grays Harbor Community Hospital when David Gerard was four years old. If anything, Kurt began his first years in a residence that was even more dilapidated than the Gerard household. In fact, Cobain’s first home was little more than a shack on a back alley in Aberdeen. Charles R. Cross, Cobain’s biographer, wrote of that place: The residence was so tiny and decrepit, it made even Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi, look palatial by contrast.
Not unlike Gerard’s, Kurt Cobain’s parents divorced when Kurt was young, nine years old to be exact. And Cross wrote: To Kurt it was an emotional holocaust. No other single event in his life had more of an effect on the shaping of his personality.
It’s hard to know what effect his parents’ divorce had on young David Gerard, but apparently it was not good. Suddenly thrust into the role of the eldest male in the household, he became arrogant and angry. He argued with his mother and he fought with his siblings. Sometimes these arguments went beyond being just verbal. David spoke years later of being hit in the head by a frying pan wielded by his mother. Whether that was true or not is hard to tell. By that point there was as good a chance that Gerard was lying as he was telling the truth about his younger years. In fact, Frankie Cochran said that “David is a big liar.”
For Kurt Cobain and his ruptured family, when his father moved out of the house, it was to a place only blocks away from where David Gerard and his mother and siblings were living at the time. By the time Kurt was nine and a half years old, he went to live with his father. Perhaps out of a feeling of guilt at the divorce, Kurt’s father, Don, bought young Kurt a Yamaha motorized mi
nibike, and Kurt became somewhat of a sensation in the neighborhood. He would ride the minibike in a nearby field, and it’s a very good likelihood that David Gerard saw him there. Whether Gerard interacted with Cobain at that point is not known, but there is every possibility that he did. A woman named Nora, who lived in the area at the time, spoke later of Gerard hanging around young children in the area. She did not think it was heathy and she didn’t have much respect for Gerard. Besides, Kurt was only four years younger than Gerard, and any kid with a minibike in that poor neighborhood was sure to attract attention.
In 1979, Wendy Cobain, Kurt’s mother, granted her ex-husband, Don, sole custody of Kurt. Kurt and Don went to live in Montesano, not far from the sheriff’s office and courthouse that would play such a prominent role in David Gerard’s life in the coming years. And it was in Montesano that Kurt took two very crucial steps in his young life: First, his uncle bought him a secondhand cheap Japanese electric guitar. Second, Kurt started experimenting with drugs at the age of fourteen.
From that point on, the interaction and interweaving of locales that tied together parts of Kurt Cobain’s life and David Gerard’s bordered on the incredible. Kurt bounced around from his father’s house to his mother’s house to his grandparents’ house to friends’ homes. He even ended up spending a lot of time in downtown Aberdeen, where Gerard was now starting to hang out at taverns and cafés. Both Cobain and Gerard were constantly short of money during this period of time. And both sometimes took refuge in the Timberland Library, just to get out of the weather. Gerard was definitely not there to read books. He hated anything to do with education, and Frankie would later say that he wasn’t into books or even movies.
Another thing Kurt and David had in common was a fascination with guns. With Kurt, it was more symbolic than functional. He really never was a hunter. But from the time Gerard was a boy, he often went out into the woods to hunt deer, elk and even bear. He was especially proud of his skills at hunting bear. Hunting was the one activity that Gerard was good at, and he also knew how to use a knife.
Kurt’s fascination with guns started around the time that his mother, Wendy, had a huge argument with her boyfriend, Pat O’Connor. According to Charles R. Cross, Wendy became so mad at O’Connor for cheating on her, she threatened to kill him with his own guns. Afraid that she might actually go through with her threat, Wendy and Kurt’s sister, Kim, hauled a sack of O’Connor’s rifles down to the Wishkah River. Then they threw the sack into the murky waters of the river.
When Kurt found out about this, he made Kim show him the exact spot where they had thrown the guns into the river. Kurt was able to fish the rifles out of the water. He took them to a local pawnshop and bought an amplifier for his electric guitar with the proceeds. Guns would also become a big part of David Gerard’s life. In fact, Lane would even look at the murder of a man in the woods and wonder if Gerard had killed the man and had taken his rifle.
The Wishkah River, and especially the Young Street Bridge over it, which was only a couple of blocks from Wendy Cobain’s house, became inextricably tied in with Kurt’s legend. It was a legend that he created from truths, half-truths and downright lies. In this regard he and David Gerard were very much the same. They both created stories about themselves, and over time came to believe the stories they created as being the absolute truth. Gerard, in particular, would create stories and alibis, and would stick with them no matter how outrageous they were. In regard to the Young Street Bridge, Kurt Cobain did the same thing. It became a part of his history, even though much of it was his own invention.
It was with the Young Street Bridge in mind that Cobain created one of his most autobiographical songs, “Something in the Way.” The something in the way was him. He was always in the way of one parent or the other, filled with his own perception that they really didn’t want him around.
In Kurt’s mythmaking he would constantly tell others of being kicked out of his mother’s house when he was seventeen years old, then going to live beneath the Young Street Bridge, only two blocks from her house. What was amazing, again, was the fact that this bridge was near the area where Gerard hung out all the time. There is no factual proof that Gerard and Cobain ran into each other in that area, but it would have been more than likely that they did. After all, Elaine McCollum and David Gerard were not exactly best friends, but several people after her death said that Gerard absolutely knew Elaine, just by the fact that they often frequented the same taverns of downtown Aberdeen.
In later years a reporter asked a patron who frequented Mac’s Tavern, where David Gerard sometimes hung out, if Gerard ever hung out at the Young Street Bridge. The person related, “He went there sometimes. I wouldn’t call it a hangout of his. But he definitely was around that area.”
David and Kurt did diverge in one area. Over time, Kurt would take almost any illegal drug he could lay his hands on. By the time he was in his late teens, he was taking LSD on a continual basis and was smoking marijuana almost daily. But alcohol was always the drug of choice for David Gerard. He would go from slightly buzzed to downright drunk when he could afford it. He bragged about how on many occasions he drove around the area while drunk.
And for both young men, money was a continual problem. Neither one of them ever held down a steady job. Yet despite all his drug-taking, Cobain practiced on his guitar with almost a religious fervor, getting better all the time. For his part David Gerard just drifted from one low-paying job to another. Drifted from tavern to tavern, going nowhere.
There appeared to be a constant connection and a divergence of their lives that wound around and then took off in completely different directions. For David Gerard, the Young Street Bridge was just another place to drink; to Kurt Cobain, it was the very symbol of his life in Aberdeen, as he perceived it to be. Kurt might have been amazed and then cynical about a billboard that the city of Aberdeen eventually put up in a small park next to the Young Street Bridge. On the billboard was a large photo of Kurt at his most grungy, unkempt hair partially covering his eyes and almost a sneer on his lips. And in a strange way Kurt never quite knew what to think of Aberdeen—he both loved and hated it. And Aberdeen was both proud of its native son and embarrassed by him as well, knowing that he had such harsh words about the area at times.
The connection of Kurt Cobain and David Gerard took on its most improbable and amazing aspect because of what happened on the same banks of the Wishkah River. If Cobain was the most famous inhabitant of its muddy banks in the 1980s, then Billy Gohl was its most infamous resident in the early twentieth century. And once again, in that strange convergence of destiny, David Gerard had an incredible link to Billy Gohl. A link that would not come to light until Lane Youmans stumbled upon it many years later.
Billy Gohl (pronounced ghoul) drifted into Aberdeen after spending time in the Yukon goldfields. By 1903, Billy had become a delegate of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. His office was a building that sat on pilings over the Wishkah River. The building had one curious addition to it, a chute that emptied directly into the river.
In his capacity as delegate for the Sailors Union, Billy helped sailors find jobs aboard oceangoing ships and often held their money and valuables until they got back from sea. At some point all that money and all those valuables must have become too much of a temptation for Billy. One by one, sailors that had no close family ties or ties to Aberdeen began to disappear. This was not too unusual in Aberdeen, considered one of the roughest ports on the West Coast. With its scores of saloons, brothels and street toughs, Aberdeen was a dangerous place in the early 1900s.
During an eight-month period while Billy Gohl was in the area, forty-three bodies were found floating in Grays Harbor and the Wishkah River. Some of the men had been beaten, others stabbed, and yet others looked as if they’d been clubbed over the head, perhaps while intoxicated. The bodies started being cynically nicknamed the Floater Fleet. Not too much attention was paid to all of this, since these men were at the lowest economic rung
in the county, and given to alcoholism and fits of violence. It was assumed that many of them had gotten into fights with one another, and the winner would deposit the loser into the harbor or Wishkah River.
In point of fact, there is a very good possibility that Billy Gohl was killing some of his clients and dumping their bodies down the chute directly into the Wishkah River, which drained into Grays Harbor. He might have gotten away with more killings, except that in 1909 he went too far and was fingered for the murder of a man named Charley Hatberg.
Despite so much evidence against him, Billy Gohl was not unlike David Gerard, in that he created an alibi and then stuck with it no matter what. Gohl testified that Charley Hatberg was alive and up in Alaska. Gohl said that the body the sheriff’s office found on the sandbar was not that of Hatberg. It was just some poor unfortunate, and he had no idea who that person was.
Then the prosecution brought in a severed arm that had been pickled; they showed it to the jury. The arm had a distinctive tattoo on it. The same tattoo that Charley Hatberg had on his arm. With this evidence, Billy Gohl was convicted of murder and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. Eventually Gohl was transferred to a facility for the criminally insane and died there in 1928.
Even though Billy Gohl was convicted only for this murder, many people believed some of the bodies of the Floater Fleet had been Gohl’s victims. They were sure he had murdered them, dumped their bodies down the chute into the Wishkah River, and then took their belongings. Like many in law enforcement in the 1990s, there were some that thought what was known about the crimes of Billy Gohl were just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, some thought that David Gerard was Grays Harbor’s most prolific killer since the days of Billy Gohl.